Collaborative Research: Working meetings to break down theoretical and disciplinary silos in research on change in undergraduate STEM education

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To enhance undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education for all students, instructional practices and curricula with robust evidence of their effectiveness need to be more widely implemented in our colleges and universities. Accomplishing this goal will require institutions of higher education, their departments, and faculty members to change current policies and practices. Theories about making such changes come from diverse disciplines. The resulting complexity and breadth of the literature makes it challenging to identify and understand relevant theories. Additionally, most investigations of change in undergraduate STEM education focus on a single initiative, so the results of many studies are needed to refine theories of change and to identify approaches for meaningful change. Thus, there is a need for a rigorous, analytical synthesis of these theories and how they might be used to promote meaningful change in undergraduate STEM education. The goals of this project are to break down theoretical and disciplinary silos, and to build capacity to more effectively investigate, understand, and facilitate changes that enhance undergraduate STEM education.This Improving Undergraduate STEM Education project will convene a series of in-person and virtual meetings in which researchers who investigate systemic change in undergraduate education will synthesize and organize theories of change. In the process, these meetings will build community and enhanced capacity for research on systemic change in undergraduate STEM education. Meetings will include about 20 discipline-based education researchers from different STEM disciplines who are emerging scholars studying change, as well as national leaders in systemic change in undergraduate STEM. The work accomplished in these meetings will help investigators make better use of relevant theories of change in their STEM education research. The products of this work will be shared via journal articles as well as Wikipedia pages and the Accelerating Systemic Change Network website.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.